If government investigators believed there was potential
evidence relating to the horrific car bombing that killed
Danilo Anderson in a school, there was a perfectly effective
way to look for it -go over to the school at 5PM when the
students are gone, and tell the school administration to stand
aside while you look around. But that's not what they did.
Instead, a phalanx of government police raided the place,
like heavily armed marines attacking a nest of terrorists
bunkered in a school in Iraq, and at the early morning hour
when 1,500 students and hundreds of faculty and parents were
arriving to begin a day of learning. Well, a lot was learned
that day, indeed.

The fact that it was a Jewish school is lost on no one. This
was an unmistakable message to the Jewish community, which
has heard that loathsome message many times before. Early
on, the Nazis used this tactic against the Jews to strike
fear in their hearts, as it did. The whole world knows what
came after that. In the Soviet Union, Jews were subjected
to similar harbingers of their persecution. Targeting Jews
served the purposes of ideological and racist fanatics since
the diaspora, the expulsion of Jews from Palestine thousands
of years ago. It starts with symbolic attacks on Jews as outsiders
in the communities they have lived in for generations, and
communicates the ethnic cleansing the authorities may have
in mind. The people of Europe and North America are especially
sensitive to this symbolism, because they remember the holocaust
and the gulag first hand, as does every Jew who survived thereafter.
World wars have been fought over this issue, and may still.

In Venezuela, the Jewish community has disappeared into the
fabric of the society, as it has all over the world. Yet it
is astonishing to Jews learn that they are not French, not
American, not Mexican, not Venezuelan, not Russian -they are
always and only Jews. No matter how many generations a Jewish
family may have lived in Venezuela, this one incident triggers
the fear that once again, they may be targeted as different,
despicable, squalid, putrid, filthy maggots. In the deafening
silence from the government following this symbolic event,
everyone in the community, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists,
and those with mixed ethnic or religious background, must
stand up to the authorities, and say with one voice: I am
a Jew. We are all Jews.
Michael Rowan's column is published every Tuesday